The huge list below shows most of the surnames (and patronymic names) that appear in CRARG’s projects that are specifically for Nowa Brzeźnica, which is one of our core towns. The number indicates how many times the name appears. Records for persons from this town can also appear in projects for other towns, especially in marriage records and records for non-permanent residents.

Surname spellings: For our surnames that come from Polish and Russian documents, note the interchangeable letters i/j (e.g., Fraiman/Frajman) and h/ch (e.g., Horowicz/Chorowicz) and the letter g that may appear in place of h (e.g., Gofman instead of Hofman). Because some of the record collections we type include both Jews and non-Jews, a few of the names below are for non-Jews.

Some history: Ten Jews lived in Brzeźnica (now called Nowa Brzeźnica) in 1793, and nearly 300 by 1857. Before World War II, 150 Jewish families made up 60% of the population. Gloria Berkenstat Freund writes: “In the section on Brzeznica that appears in Memorial Book of the Community of Radomsk and Vicinity, a survivor describes the reaction of her Polish neighbors to the expulsion of Brzeznica’s Jews this way [David Goldman, trans.]: ‘I remained as the last Jewish woman in Brzeznica in the month of Nisan (April) 1942… I shall never forgive our Polish neighbors, with whom we lived, played, and studied in school. They stood in the streets, watching our suffering [as we saw our mothers, women and children for the last time], as if it were a festival ceremony. Clapping and laughing, they watched this tragic expulsion of our parents and children, as our women and children were being sent to their death.’”

What next? For Nowa Brzeźnica (and nearby towns), some data will be in our Holocaust records, but the vast majority will be in our pre-Holocaust records.

Berkenstat bakery and home in Nowa Brzeźnica (image source: CRARG member Gloria Berkenstat Freund, New York, New York USA)

Historical information on towns is drawn from Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem, Israel: Macmillan, 1978), Shmuel Spector, editor-in-chief, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 2001), Pinkas Hakehillot: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, Poland (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976), and several town Yizkor books. For their help with translating town histories, we thank Gloria Berkenstat Freund (Yiddish) and Udi Cain (Hebrew).

Thinking of joining CRARG? Feel free to write to me (dkazez@crarg.org) to ask if we have records for your family! Daniel Kazez, CRARG President (a volunteer position). All CRARG funding is used for translating/typing archival documents. CRARG is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Contributions to CRARG are tax-deductible for U.S. citizens.